YOU.

et’s say your uncle gives you a boat. You say to your friends, “Look at the boat my uncle gave me.”

The first year you own the boat, you decide to replace the boards in the hull. Maybe the second year you replace the seats. The third year you replace the ropes and hardware. If you keep going, year after year repairing and replacing bits and pieces, eventually every part of the boat will be new.

And yet, you still describe it as, “The boat my uncle gave me.”

The cells of our body are constantly repairing and replacing themselves. About 330 billion cells are replaced every day. Muscle cells are replaced roughly every 15 years, while a skin cell only last about 2 weeks. The cells of our skeleton are replaced about every 10 years, while liver cells are typically replaced after 1-2 years. Our red blood cells (which can travel up to 300 miles in their lifespan) replace themselves every 2-4 months.

If you and I meet for coffee and then don’t see each other for 10-15 years, when we meet again we are almost entirely “new”. 

And yet — you are still “you” and I am still “me.”

The YOU, behind the You, behind the you

There’s “you”, the physical body. A collection of cells that make up all the parts of you, including your bones, organs, muscles, and brain. This physical body lets you experience the world; running, jumping, climbing trees – that sort of thing. 

But take a step back, and there’s a “You behind the you” — the mind. That “You” can think and analyse. It can picture the colour blue, add 2 plus 2, and decide which is closer London or Moscow. That You can also remember the past and imagine the future. It can remember how hard you laughed when your best friend did that thing back in school and imagine how good your sandwich is going to taste at lunch.

But then you can take another step back, and that’s when something amazing happens. That’s when You discover that there’s a “YOU” behind the “You” behind the “you”. 

And that YOU is SO much bigger than the physical and mental experience that you’re having.

Can we ever know who we really are? Simply posing the question runs into an obstacle if we believe that who we are is a walking package of billions and billions of cells. Cells are little bottles of salt water that process chemicals in totally predictable ways. The same goes for brain cells, and no matter how closely you stare at a CT scan or fMRI of the brain, the hot spots that light up seem a long way from Shakespeare and Mozart. Nobody has convincingly shown how glucose – or blood sugar, which isn’t all that different from the sugar in a sugar bowl – suddenly learns to think after it passes through a thin membrane and enters the brain.

– Deepak Chopra

Finding YOU

Meditation is often described as “quieting” or “silencing” the mind, and yoga teachers often describe yoga as a “moving meditation”. But my mind is definitely not silent when I am trying to touch my head to my knee, and I can’t remember a single moment in years of mediation where my mind wasn’t prattling away about something!

So what if it’s not about silence? Or stillness?

What if yoga (and meditation) is actually an intense and complete focus of awareness in the physical now? What if it means becoming so present in the moment, that we find ourselves able to step back from the body? And then back from the mind? 

…Into the YOU behind the You behind the you.

From here we can take it ALL in — every sensation, every thought, every emotion. We can observe the totality of the experience that is our life while simultaneously experiencing ourselves as something greater still.

From this place of awareness comes a deeper experience, a visceral knowing. YOU are not your body. YOU are not the thoughts You think, the past You remember, the futures You imagine, or the feelings that You feel.

YOU are something so much more…